Cold Spring Harbor, New York, United States
Highly motivated Software Architect supporting nuclear physics research at Brookhaven National Lab. Lead developer of the simulations framework for the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, and member of the STAR software and computing management team. Developing the near-realtime sPHENIX data production system.
STAR Simulation leader / member S&C Management Team As STAR simulation leader I am responsible for the maintenance and development of the STAR simulation software stack, and serve on the Software and Computing Management Team. Working with the S&C team, I have participated in updating our offline software stack to use a new major version of the ROOT framework. I have developed a new simulation package based on the Geant4 and VMC toolkits that will serve as a drop-in replacement for our (legacy) GEANT3 simulation application, and will soon organize testing by the collaboration. sPHENIX Distributed Computing Developer I am applying my expertise in both python and C++ development to a new (for me) arena of distributed computing, supporting the sPHENIX experiment in developing a near real-time data production system: the sPHENIX Handy Remote Execution Koordinator (aka SHREK). This system leverages the PanDA distributed workflow management system to steer the creation of jobs on the underlying batch system at BNL, and the Rucio distributed data management system to archive the resulting data products. As part of my responsibilities in this effort, I chair a weekly coordination meeting between the PanDA and Rucio experts, the experimental stakeholders, and the compute facility at BNL, in order to identify requirements, mitigate risks, and steer the development of the production system.
With the integration of the Heavy Flavor Tracker (HFT) into the STAR detector, I was tapped to coordinate development efforts of our offline software team (2-4 developers), both simulation and track reconstruction. In order to fully realize the physics potential of precision tracking in STAR, we needed to achieve a 3-fold increase in track reconstruction speed without sacrificing quality of reconstruction. To achieve this we profiled our codes, and analyzed our geometry and track propagation models to identify potential bottlenecks. We extended the quality assessment codes used in previous tracking R&D and instituted a rigorous test driven development cycle to maintain and improve quality. On the simulation side, we extended and improved the geometry model in order to represent the small misalignments of the HFT sensors from their ideal "as designed" positions. Applying these misalignments to realistic simulations accounting for the effects of backgrounds required additional rounds of test-driven development to identify additional sources of uncertainty in our simulations.
As a Senior Application Engineer, I took on an increasing role in the evolution of the STAR simulation software stack, implementing a new event persistence model based on the ROOT toolkit, and developing a new event generation framework to simplify the addition of new generation models to the simulation stack. Named co-Leader of the Simulation group in STAR. During this time I continued to support the STAR experiment's physics program by providing simulations of current and planned experimental runs, and assisting hardware groups in implementing detector upgrades within the STAR geometry model. Additionally I took on a role in validation testing one of the tracking R&D efforts in the experiment.
Taught engineering-level freshman physics courses (classical mechanics / electricity and magnetism). Performed research on the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Mentored students on research projects.
Continued work on the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, developing algorithms for the resoncstruction of high energy decays of neutral pions, and the separation of prompt photons from the background of energetic neutral pion decays.
Participated in the construction and commissioning of the STAR experiment's Endcap Electromagnetic Calorimeter. Developed software for the commissioning and calibration of the detector, level-2 real time trigger, and general packages for the analysis and simulation of the detector.